Wow! My friends survived a tornado ripping apart their house. Half way through this video, it all goes black, and they scream for each other until reassured they are okay. House totally destroyed. Only slab left. Canton, Texas. April 29, 2017.
UPDATE: The family has set up a GoFundMe account if you would like to help them rebuild from this devastation: https://www.gofundme.com/3pv0u2w
I've known them for 20 years, and they will survive this with their amazing upbeat and get-to-it drive and personalities. As they said today, "We don't speak Whinese"
Update May 1st: Thank you all for your caring support. The tornado may have started right on their property; they had absolutely NO warning. The update on the animals so far is: both calves survived (one was carried 2 miles away!), all the ducks but one survived, one cat survived, one cat died, the dog made it, 2/3 of the poultry didn't make it. Loads of people came over yesterday to help them clean up and brought love and food. This is when you see the best of people.
Update 4/30/17: They are totally okay. Nothing left of their beautiful farm. Will update you when I have more info about the animals.
Here's a note from Angelia Williams herself to all of you about what happened:
Onyx Ranch is a dream that’s been building in us for the last several years: building sustainable food supply in your own backyard. We started with our own backyard chickens and built up to aquaponics. We had raised Katahdin meat sheep in the past and decided to put everything we’ve learned into practice on a larger scale so we can build backyard starter packages for families in subdivisions.
We bought the acreage at the end of February and have worked tirelessly rebuilding old dilapidated out buildings, paddocks and improving fencing. We added Katahdins, some heifers and over 124 poultry (we’ve honestly lost count) which includes midget white turkeys, pekin ducks, production red hens, and many other species of poultry.
The ranch we are building sported a 777 sq ft cottage on Pollard Lake, which is about a 2-acre lake and is the lake visible from the video. This is the small house my husband and I were in when the weather suddenly turned from a normal Texas thunderstorm into what looked like hurricane winds. Cliff was filming, because we film everything! The winds were outrageous but we did not expect a tornado – in fact the winds appeared straight to us. But as you can see from the video, the winds escalated quickly…I grabbed our dogs to drag them in the house just as the house ripped up off the foundation and hit us from behind. Even though Cliff was right beside me, I was in front of the door and he had a wall in front of him. He was slammed into the wall which fell forward to the ground and the wall that was behind him sandwiched him down tight. I flew through the door and onto the carport outside and somehow, the door ended up on my back. The winds were around 165 mph. I can’t tell you how or why I didn’t fly away but I didn’t!
